Better Today Than Saturday

The outside temperature gauge on TigerBlog's dashboard as he pulled into Lot 21 read 53 degrees. As he got out of his car, the first thing he had to get was his umbrella.

That's the kind of morning it is around here.

As he started the short walk into the building, TigerBlog had one thought: Better today than Saturday.

When his colleague Craig Sachson walked in, the first thing he said was this: Better today than Saturday.

In between, TigerBlog talked to one person, Ryan Yurko, whose exact title is either "Assistant Director of Athletics For Finance and Administration" or "guy who has something to do with money." And what did Yurko say?

Right. Better today than Saturday.

The unanimous thinking in Jadwin this morning seems to be that it's worth it to have a rainy Wednesday in exchange for Saturday's forecast, which is this: Sunny, high 67, zero percent chance of rain.

And that makes today not that big a deal.

What's going on Saturday? A lot.

Princeton is home against Harvard in four different events, beginning at noon in field hockey and continuing with football at 1, women's soccer at 4 and men's soccer at 7. Admission to three of those four is free.

All four are huge games in their Ivy League races. Each one will have a direct impact on who wins the championship in each sport, even with several weeks to go for each.

But hey, that's not for right now.

For now, TigerBlog wants to talk about Yurko.

One of TB's favorite words to describe people is "amiable," as in "having or displaying a friendly and pleasant manner." If anyone fits that description, it's Yurko.  

He's a Midwesterner, transplanted here to the East, and he's pretty much what you'd expect from someone from Indiana, which is interesting, because as TigerBlog writes these words, his iTunes is playing the music from "Hoosiers."

That's actually true.

Yurko came up with an idea that TigerBlog thought wasn't too bad. Play the last two Harvard football games on the website in advance of Saturday's game, sort of like ESPN does before a big game. Of course if they were Ivy League Digital Network games (as opposed to ESPN3; TB can't remember), they'd already be archived.

But it wasn't a bad idea.

From there, Yurko went down the path of suggesting a regular feature of old games, and the first one he mentioned was the 1989 NCAA men's basketball game against Georgetown, which he had never seen. TigerBlog suggested that if Yurko did watch the game, he'd come away shocked by how in control of the game the Tigers were and how much it got away at the end.

After that, TigerBlog took Yurko through Ivy League men's basketball of the 1990s, which was a glorious time for the Princeton-Penn rivalry. 

Princeton won in 1989 and played Georgetown, losing 50-49 in the classic 16 vs. 1 game. Princeton also won the next three years, making the class of 1992 the only one in Ivy men's basketball history (since freshmen became eligible in the 1970s) to win four league titles in four years. 

Princeton also lost in the first round of the NCAA tournament all four of those years, by a total of 15 points. The losses were by one to Georgetown, four to Arkansas, two to Villanova and eight to Syracuse.

TigerBlog is still bothered by the Villanova loss in the Carrier Dome. It's one of his five worst losses for Princeton Athletics that he has experienced, maybe even second, behind the loss to Michigan State in 1998 in the second round.

Penn then went 42-0 between 1993 and 1995, with an NCAA win over Nebraska in 1994 at the Nassau Coliseum. Then Penn beat Princeton in the first game of the 1996 Ivy season before the Tigers won 12 straight and the Quakers stumbled against Yale and Dartmouth. Penn beat Princeton on the final day of the regular season to force a playoff, and Princeton then won that historic game, the one at Lehigh on the night Pete Carril quite casually mentioned that he was retiring.

Then it was the win over UCLA. And then two more Ivy titles, as well as a 27-2 record and Top 10 ranking in 1998.

What's fascinating about it to TigerBlog is that there are fewer and fewer people who work here who were here for those days. 
There's a real value to what Gary Walters always called "institutional memory," and it's one of TigerBlog's best things. Writing here every day helps to maintain that. 

TB was a history major at Penn, and he's always loved the historical side of Princeton Athletics. It's how he came across the fact that Princeton Athletics turns 150 next month - spoiler alert - there will be a lot more on this subject in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, TB also tried to get across to Yurko how much he would have loved to have seen what Jadwin Gym was like for some of those games, back before the Princeton Offense was copied and dispersed throughout the entire basketball world and before every game was on TV someplace.

It's sort of like Palmer Stadium in the older days. TB has seen pictures of it. He wonders what it would have been like.

And TigerBlog could probably have talked for 10 hours about those 10 years of Ivy basketball, from 1989-1998. They were really special times in Princeton history, and TB had a front row seat for all of it.
Yurko probably would have listened. That's what amiable people from Indiana do.